Grand Theft Orca

I played EVE on and off for the first ten years of its life. I saw it featured on Portal, thought it was gorgeous, and immediately went to sign up on their forums and for their closed beta. There's a lot I can say about it¹, but I wanna retell a story from New Eden. Unlike most EVE stories -- tales of titanic conflicts and betrayals years in the making -- this one is tiny.

In the late 00s, I was running Yasashii Heavy Industries. This was as boring as a corp could get: we were high-sec industrialists. Mostly, we were some friends who'd watch shows together while mining in the background. We had set up shop in an Amarrian system called Gensela: production from one of the stations, and a starbase at a nearby moon with tons of research labs.

What we did was very routine: mine all the ore in Gensela², then move to a nearby system and mine ice to keep our research labs fueled up.

InfinityB and I would both make a trip down to to Jita every week; him in a freighter, and me in an orca. We'd both bring back materials we couldn't mine in Gensela: null-sec ores, some things for our fuel mix, and any new equipment we might need. We sold off T1 modules & ships we made³, and raw ice products.

One morning, we jumped to the ice field, synced up a show, and got to work. We mined uneventfully for a few hours: everyone dumping their blocks of ice into our orca every ten minutes or so, and when my hold was full, I'd spend a few minutes taking it back to our HQ one system over, in Gensela.

Between episodes, somebody piped up and said hey wait. It wasn't unusual to see other mackinaws⁴ in Miah. Ice fields weren't that common, so ice miners had to concentrate. The field itself was huge and there was no possibility of running out of ice, so there was no reason to pay attention to other miners.

But, we had spotted something unusual: one pilot in a mackinaw, with an unpiloted orca floating next to the mining barge.

The orca is classified as an "industrial command ship" -- it's a support vessel for mining operations. It's a smaller cousin of a capital hull that can be operated in high-security space, but keeps a lot of the capital-class amentities like a hangar you can dock/launch ships from in the field.

Yasashii Heavy Industry mining ops always had my alt in an orca, providing a secure space to dump stuff for hauling back in bulk. But I had a dedicated alt for it, providing buffs to the dozen characters we brought with us. The alt lived in that ship.

But there is another way to use it, for a solo player: put a mining barge in the hangar, fly the orca to a mining site, and eject. You can launch a mining barge from the hangar and pilot that instead, leaving the orca floating free. The barge can dump ice into the orca until it's full, dock back up, and fly the haul back to a station for processing.

This has a huge caveat: there's no ownership of an unpiloted vessel. Any player can eject from their ship, float over in their capsule, and slot themselves into the 'pilot seat' (so to speak). The potential hijacker would need to be trained in flying industrial command ships to do it -- this is not a common skill, but I just so happened to have a dedicated orca pilot on hand.

Now, something important to understand about EVE is that it's not a game about cooperation. This is the Space Capitalism Hellscape simulator. It's explicitly allowed and encouraged to trick people into sending you all of their money. This is a game about getting ahead by fucking somebody else over.

We saw a hull worth 490m ISK⁵ floating free in space. This was an opportunity to double the mining operation's profits for ten minutes of work.

The team put together a plan: act natural, so the solo miner wouldn't know something is up. We kept mining as usual and waited for my orca's hold to fill up. I aligned with the gate and jumped our cargo home, just as I'd been doing every 20 minutes for the last few hours. It looked like we were business as usual.

But instead of coming back with the orca, I came back in a shuttle. I couldn't warp into the ice belt right on top of the unpiloted orca, so there would be a few moments for the miner to realize what was happening and reclaim their ship. The shuttle was worth nothing and super-quick, so it was my best bet.

This was not a high-action situation, but the team was still nervous on Mumble. I turned up in my shuttle amidst our barges, and immediately sprinted for the orca. It took about two and a half minutes to burn out to the orca from our position, which felt like ten years to us.

But I pulled alongside the orca, docked up, and jacked in. The ship was ours!

About half an hour later, we saw the miner eject from the barge. Then float there in their capsule for a bit before going back to the barge. We think it took that long before they noticed their command ship had vanished out from under them.

We never said anything about it, and they never asked. To the hapless miner, Grand Theft: Orca would forever be an unsolved mystery.